Arthur Koestler

Born in Budapest, Hungary. Koestler was educated at the University of Vienna. He was the author of many popular books including Arrow in the Blue, (Volume I of his autobiography), Darkness at Noon (a novel about the evils of Communism), The Yogi and the Commissar (another book about Communism), The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Creation, and The Thirteenth Tribe. In the latter work, Koestler argued that most Jews today are descendants of the Khazars, a people in the Caucasus who adopted Judaism in the 8th century and were later forced to move westwards into current Russia and Poland.

Koestler was fluent in Hungarian, German, and English, and knew some rusty Hebrew. From 1926 to 1929 he lived for a short time in Israel. Koestler, an advocate of euthanasia, and suffering from Alzheimer's disease, took his own life along with his wife in a joint suicide in England.

Much of Koestler's work was completely out of step with mainstream views. He did not merely arrive at different answers to common questions. Instead, Koestler answered, or tried to answer, important questions that others were not even asking. Some considered this a sign of his true creative genius.

Koestler's book The Thirteenth Tribe[?] advanced the controversial conclusion that European, or Ashkenazi Jews, are not descended from the Israelites of antiquity, but from a group of Khazars who converted to Judaism in the middle ages. Koestler stated that part of his intent in writing the book was to defuse anti-semitism by undermining the identification of European Jews with the Jews of the Bible, rendering anti-semitic epithets like "Christ killer", for example, inapplicable. Ironically, Koestler's thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not semitic has become an important article of many anti-semitic groups. Some Palestinian advocates have adopted this thesis quite eagerly, since identifying most Jews as non-semitic seriously undermines their historical claims to the land of Israel.

Koestler's own view of Israel was that it would never be destroyed, short of a second Holocaust. He supported the statehood of Israel, but opposed the idea of a diaspora Jewish culture. In an interview in the London Jewish Chronicle, about the time of Israel's statehood, Koestler asserted that all Jews should either migrate to Israel or else assimilate completely into their local cultures.

The result of this originality is a uneven set of ideas and conclusions. Some of his, such as his work on creativity, can be appreciated as brilliant. Some ideas challenge us to readjust our thinking in order to grasp their importance. Other ideas are little more than nonsense. But taken as a whole, they are well worth serious consideration.

Books by Arthur Koestler

• Darkness at Noon[?]
• Arrival and Departure[?]
• The Yogi and the Commissair[?]
• Thieves in the Night[?]
• Promise and Fulfilment[?]
• Insight and Outlook[?]
• The God That Failed[?]
• Arrow in the Blue
• The Invisible Writing[?]
• The Trail of the Dinossaur[?]
• Reflections on Hanging[?]
• The Sleepwalkers[?]
• The Act of Creation[?]
• The Ghost in the Machine[?]
• The Case of the Midwife Toad[?] (1971: about the biologist Paul Kammerer[?], who researched Lamarckian inheritance[?])
• The Roots of Coincidence[?]
• Janus: A Summing Up[?]
• Bricks to Babel[?]
• Kaleidoscope[?]

• Stranger on the Square[?]

External Links

• Koestler and his wife left a large sum of money for research into parapsychology: this funded, amongst other things, the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh University (http://moebius.psy.ed.ac.uk/index.php3?text=1 )

• http://koestlerarthur.fw.hu (http://koestlerarthur.fw.hu)